Carrie's run

CHAPTER 23

Le Hippodrome, Beirut, Lebanon

They set up in the trees behind the grandstand at the Hippodrome racetrack, the sunset casting the shadow of the grandstand across the track and the trees. There were seven of them: her, Virgil, Ziad and four men of the Forces Libanaises he had brought with him. They were well armed, all four with M4 carbines; one of them had an M4 with an M203 grenade launcher attached.

Carrie didn’t like using the FLs, but there wasn’t much choice. Things were moving too fast. She believed Saul was on his way to Beirut, but he wouldn’t get there in time and there wasn’t time to put an SOG, a CIA Special Operations Group team, in place.

There were a hundred reasons not to use the FLs. They weren’t trained, they weren’t under her control, they were sectarian to their core and they would be dealing with their Shiite enemies. A total wild-card scenario.

There was only one reason to use them. Nightingale/al-Douni never went anywhere without armed Hezbollah guards, so she needed some kind of muscle. Saul had agreed, reluctantly, during their texting interaction earlier that day.

She had gone to an Internet café on Rue Makhoul in Hamra, near the American University, getting onto a computer against the wall next to a teenage Arab boy gaming with online friends. As previously agreed, to keep what she was doing separate from normal channels that Davis Fielding would have access to, she and Saul communicated via a chat room for teenagers so heavily trafficked, there was little chance of their conversation being hacked. The volume was simply too great for even powerful intelligence-agency search-engine algorithms to find an individual conversation.

The way they’d set the chat up, Carrie was supposedly a high school senior from Bloomington, Illinois, named Bradley, and Saul was a girl named Tiffany from nearby Normal Community High School. She sent him her report and the photo of Mohammed Siddiqi as attachments.

“hey qt pie. u got every1 in nesa going loco,” Saul typed. NESA was the CIA’s Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis, an elite group that included the Agency’s best Middle East experts.

“ctc?” she typed back. Was David Estes’s Counterterrorism Center unit also involved?

“24/7. im jealous. u got all the girls attention.” About time Langley paid attention, she grumped to herself.

“do u no the real ms? who she is dating?” That was the big question. The one she absolutely had to know. Who was Mohammed Siddiqi really? What did the Company know about him? And who was he working for?

“not yet,” Saul typed back. “but yr fmr bff, allie, is working on it like its her sats.” So her former best friend forever, “allie,” Alan Yerushenko, and her colleagues at the Office of Collection Strategies and Analysis were working on it nonstop too.

“mary L thinks she’s baggy, not cutter.” Hoping he would catch that she meant Marielle thought Siddiqi was an Iraqi from Baghdad, “baggy,” and not from Qatar, which Saul pronounced “Cutter.” That plus the fact Nightingale wanted Rana to get intel on Iraq was pointing everything that had happened in Beirut and New York like a compass needle right at Abu Nazir.

“shes looking at a boo n friends,” Saul typed back, showing he got it. They were looking at “a boo n,” Abu Nazir.

“r u coming to c me?” she responded.

“c u soon. what about our lil birdie?” So Saul was on his way to Beirut. Thank God. The little birdie was Nightingale.

“big date 2nite. ok use fls?”

There was a pause so long, she wasn’t sure Saul was still there. And she had to remember the time difference, she thought, checking her watch. It was 2:47 P.M. in Beirut, before 8:00 A.M. in Langley.

“only if u have 2. Be crful,” he sent. He obviously didn’t like it. Well, she wasn’t crazy about it herself. All this dancing around, she thought, because Fielding was having an affair with a double agent he wasn’t even screwing.

“bye,” she replied, and logged off.

Which had led her and Virgil and Ziad here to the Hippodrome and the meet she’d had Rana set with Nightingale in the grandstand of the race track. Races were only run once a week, on Sundays, so today, Thursday, and at this hour, the grandstand would be empty. Hopefully, it would make Nightingale confident about coming and would give her FLs a clear field of fire if things went south.

“Where will they be coming from?” she asked in Arabic.

“There.” Ziad pointed. “From Avenue Abdallah El Yafi into the parking area. I can put two men in the trees near the French embassy compound to take care of whoever is with the car.”

Carrie turned to the two men he indicated. The other two were already in position in the stables, from which they could get to the grandstand within thirty seconds.

“You understand, we need this man, Taha al-Douni, alive? Even if they start shooting. Dead he’s of no use to us.”

“He’s a hatha neek Hezbollah piece of khara,” one of them cursed.

“This is no good.” She turned to Virgil. These crazy guys would just start shooting. “We need to abort.”

“Too late,” he said, pointing. “There’s Rana’s BMW.” She saw the blue sedan stopped at the gate. The Hippodrome was closed, but Rana had bribed the gatekeeper in advance so they could meet here.

Carrie raised her binoculars and saw it was Rana, alone, in the BMW. She watched it drive into the parking area, then turned to the two FL men.

“If shooting starts, take out the SUVs so they can’t leave. Take out the guards for the SUVs. But don’t kill anyone else, understood?” she said.

“Okay, la mashkilah.” He shrugged. No problem.

She didn’t believe him, watching as the two men moved through the trees toward the parking area.

“Let’s go,” Virgil said, his eyes scanning the grandstand. He started to jog toward it, his M4 held ready. Carrie and Ziad followed, every cell in her body screaming that this was all wrong.

She had told Rana she would be running her until further notice. There would be money and she was to say nothing to either Davis Fielding or al-Douni or anyone else, and she might not be seeing Fielding much anymore.

Her first instruction to Rana had been to set up the meet with Nightingale/al-Douni by telling him she had urgent intel on American actions against al-Qaeda in Iraq. As expected, al-Douni had agreed immediately. As Carrie listened in on Rana’s call, he was the one who set the RDV at the Hippodrome.

“What are you really after?” Rana had asked her.

“For you to feed al-Douni what I want him to know, not what he wants to know,” Carrie said. “And find out where it goes after he gets it.”

“You mean, who is he really working for? You don’t believe it’s the Syrians?” Rana said.

“He’s working more than one side.”

“Aren’t we all? This is Beirut,” Rana said.

The way she said it, that fatalism, reminded Carrie of Marielle as she ran into the grandstand and hid, lying flat behind the seats, in the fourth row. The other two FLs were waiting, hidden in the jockeys’ restroom near the passageway from the stables to the track. Were they all like that? Doomed? Was that Beirut?

Through the gap between the seats, she saw Rana walk toward the paddock to wait by the railing. The sun was setting over the racetrack, the sky pink and gold, really lovely, she thought, the shadows lengthening, making it harder to see. In a little while, it would be dark.

A few minutes later, her cell phone buzzed. A signal from the FLs near the parking area. Nightingale had arrived.

Carrie waited, every nerve ending screaming as if an electrical current was surging through them. Any second now, Nightingale would be coming up to Rana. It was critical that she hear what he said before they moved. Whatever happened, they shouldn’t move too soon. They had wired Rana and set it to a receiver connected with Carrie’s earbud.

She spotted Nightingale through the gap in the seats. He was accompanied by three of his Hezbollah guards. The son of a bitch really never went anywhere unprotected. She’d had no choice but to bring the extra firepower.

“Salaam. We just met. This better be good,” she heard him say to Rana.

“Judge for yourself. I was with the American yesterday when I came back from Baalbek,” she said.

“In his bed?”

“Of course. When he was asleep, I got to his computer. Here are the files,” she said, handing him a flash drive that Carrie had given her.

“Is that all?”

She shook her head. “There’s more. It’s about the Americans doing something in Iraq.”

“Tell me,” he demanded.

“Mohammed Siddiqi. They’ve learned about him. They know he’s Iraqi, not Qatari,” Rana said.

Carrie strained to hear; every syllable was critical.

“Khara,” Nightingale cursed. “What else?”

“They know about you too. They think-” she started to say, but never finished because at that instant, the two FLs from the passageway emerged, one of them firing at Nightingale’s men. One of the Hezbollah guards toppled face-forward; the second swiveled and returned fire.

Oh God, no, Carrie thought. Before she could say or do anything, Nightingale had pulled a pistol from his jacket. Don’t! Not Rana! her mind screamed. Don’t!

“You whore!” he shouted, firing the gun point-blank into Rana’s face.

Suddenly, there was an explosion from the parking area. The grenade launcher, Carrie thought, cringing as she half-stood and shouted in Arabic: “Don’t kill him!”

Near her, Virgil and Ziad rose up, firing their M4s into the darkness, streaked with flashes of gunfire.